Inception

"Inception" is a mind-warping science-fiction epic, a rebooted "Matrix" for Generation Z, a paranoid corporate thriller and one-last-job heist movie. It's also an odyssey of delayed homecoming, a grief-soaked ode to the Freudian subconscious - a layered labyrinthine meditation on the seduction and impact of dreams. This is spellbinding, transporting, damn near indescribable and the latest indication that Christopher Nolan might be the slyest narrative tactician making movies today.

This extraordinary movie, a profoundly strange - and strangely profound - spelunking trip through the cavernous human psyche, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb, a corporate thief who specializes in "extracting" secrets from the minds of dreaming victims. Then he's hired by a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe) to do the opposite - i.e., to plant an idea rather than nick one away. He assembles a dream team to plan and launch his attack: Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a pragmatic researcher; Tom Hardy as the "forger," a cocky dream-world impersonator; Dileep Rao as the chemist who cooks up super-powered sedatives; and Ellen Page as the "architect," a talented rookie whose first try at dream manipulation folds a Paris-like neighborhood in half (wow).

If that sounds weird, just you wait; it gets weirder. Director and producer Nolan's screenplay spreads beyond the main conceit like ivy fingering a wall, moving up and out and down to embrace multiple levels of subconsciousness.

His plan is to "seed" a viral thought in the well-guarded subliminal depths of a corporate scion (Cillian Murphy), tunneling so far in they need a triple-stacked dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream just to get there. Complicating matters is Cobb's unresolved attachment to his wife, who shows up in dreams as Marion Cotillard. (In a lovely nod to Cotillard's "La Vie en Rose," Edith Piaf appears on the soundtrack.) The sum effect is convoluted, to say the least, but all those fantastical plot twists are realized with surprising clarity, persuasive logic - and elemental human pain.

"Dreams - they feel real while we're in them, right?" asks Cobb. The same could be said for "Inception."